Many research institutions — including leading universities and hospitals — and drug companies routinely break a law that requires all results of human studies of new treatments be reported to the federal government, a new report finds.

The Boston Globe reports even prestigious institutions like Stanford University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have routinely failed to provide such reports to the National Institutes of Health’s ClinicalTrials.gov database, as required by law.

As a result, researchers are depriving patients and doctors of complete data to gauge the safety and benefits of treatments. The violations have left “gaping holes” in a federal database used by millions of patients and medical professionals to compare the effectiveness and side effects of treatments for cancer and other deadly diseases, according to the report.

The worst offenders included four of the top 10 recipients of federal medical research funding from the National Institutes of Health: Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of California-San Diego. All disclosed research results late or not at all 95 percent of the time or more since reporting became mandatory in 2008.

Drug companies have long been criticized for a lack of openness on research, but the new analysis suggests major medical schools, teaching hospitals, and nonprofit groups are also failing to comply with the public reporting requirements.

NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins acknowledged in a statement that the findings are “very troubling,” the Globe reported.